High Schools, Strikes, Yellow Vests: A Movement Looks for Its Shape

According to Libération, which takes stock on 2 November, several calls to extend the social movement have been issued after three Saturdays of mobilisation: high school blockades, a cross-sector strike called by the unions, and a "popular six-seven" from the gilets jaunes. The details of the demands, the dates and the expected scale do not appear in the summary we have access to; we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, one can have some fun with the picture: three marches, three timetables, three vocabularies. The lycée students block, the unions file their notice, the gilets jaunes reinvent a rendezvous with a slightly schoolboyish name. Commentators will see dispersion. We see a question: what becomes of an anger when nobody offers it a place where it can decide for itself?

Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the Russian mass strikes, that economic struggles and political struggles constantly feed one another. In the "heavy air" of periods of crisis, she wrote, a small local conflict can turn into a general explosion. The word matters: she was not describing a movement decreed from above, but a contagion. A school that blocks, a workshop that walks out, a roundabout that fills up again: these may be the sparks, provided they talk to one another.

This is where the trouble lies. The temptation, for the union leaderships, is to treat the cross-sector strike as a day to tick off, with its march, its figures, its press conference, and then the negotiation. But a reform wrung out of power is not socialism in a kit: what is conceded on Monday, capital takes back as soon as its profits require it. The only real measure is whether the struggle leaves workers stronger, more confident and better organised, or more tired and more docile. A "social dialogue" that demobilises is a defeat dressed up as a compromise.

Luxemburg also mocked those who wait to have a perfect organisation and a full treasury before moving: history, she said in substance, does not wait for that moment. The gilets jaunes, with neither treasury nor apparatus, already proved it in 2018. But improvisation has its limits: without assemblies where people vote, mandate and recall, energy evaporates or gets recuperated.

The real prospect, then, would be common assemblies: lycée students, wage earners, retirees, yellow vests and union members, debating the same demands in the same rooms. Nothing in what we know indicates that this already exists. But it is the only road by which three Saturdays stop being a calendar and become a school.

You do not build a movement with notices; you build it with people who learn, together, that they can decide.